Abstract
Abstract In Finnic languages, transitive verbs have two types of object, indicated by case: total and partitive. In negative clauses, the distinction between total and partitive objects is neutralized, and all objects take the partitive case. When a negative clause contains a positive complement clause, the object of the complement clause may be in the partitive even when it would otherwise be total. In this study, we examine the phenomenon in such complement clauses and test the hypothesis that case marking in complement clauses under negation reflects structural integration between the main clause and the complement clause: the more tightly the clauses are integrated, the more likely are objects to be partitive, when the main clause is negative. This hypothesis is tested with corpus data from six Finnic languages: Livonian, Estonian, Votic, Finnish, Karelian and Veps. The results of our study offer support to the hypothesis and suggest that object marking can reflect structural integration between the main clause and the complement in Finnic languages.
Published Version
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